Since learning about the effects of high CO2 concentration on attention and cognitive performance—especially at levels much higher than 2000ppm—I've started monitoring CO2 and other air quality indicators in my house, at my studio, and even on the road. I have a few other air quality monitors I'll be covering in the future, but today I wanted to focus on one I only heard about in the comments on a recent video tearing down a cheap no-name 'Air Quality Detector' from Amazon . Since l...

My wife Clara launched her art store earlier this year on ACGGOODS, and after much gentle prodding has allowed me to share it here. It has high-quality vinyl stickers, cards, and keychains of her favourite vtubers and indie authors, all hand drawn and small-batch printed. She laboured over finding a good supplier for months, but after receiving a bunch of samples she’s found one that does beautiful work. They look amazing; just as good as any anime merchandise you’d find at an Animate. ...

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-93479 for the project NGINX , site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a heap buffer overflow in worker script evaluation triggered by crafted requests when regex map captures are referenced before the map output, or when a non-cacheable variable is used in certain string expressions, causing worker restarts and potentially code execution if ASLR is disabled or...

I was perusing the always lovely website of one mr. V.H. Belvadi and stumbled my way onto a post titled “Webmentions, copyright and privacy” and from there quickly landed on Kev’s post titled “Privacy and Webmentions” . I find the topic very interesting because it sits at the intersection of two things I care much about: web based technology and human interactions. And so I’m gonna spend a moment thinking in public about this. The first issue I personally see in this overa...

I Just Can’t Wait to Be King in 16:9, running as native code. TLKRecomp is The Lion King for the Super Nintendo, rebuilt as a native PC program. It runs on Linux, Windows and Mac, plays from the Westwood logo to the final fight with Scar, and can widen the picture to 16:9. It took ten days, and AI agents wrote the code. They worked in a loop: try something, compare it frame by frame with the original game, find the first thing that differs, fix it, and go again. This post explains ...

In fall of 1985 when I started graduate school, my advisor Michael Sipser asked me to read an early handwritten manuscript by Johan Håstad of his switching lemma . I spent many hours decoding the notation and working through the messy conditional probabilities until I felt I had checked every step of the proof. When I started presenting this to Sipser, he stopped me and said he didn't want the details but instead the intuition of the proof. I had nothing. I'm reminded of this story as I hea...

I’m assuming you all gave a sigh of relief when you saw digital text rather than scans of my handwriting. This post is largely a set of updates and corrections to my previous post; given the lack of revisions I have some corrections to make. Beyond that, the lack of reflection on my thoughts during the editing process had me coming to realizations after hitting post, alongside a few misc updates. I’m assuming you all gave a sigh of relief when you saw digital text rather than scans of my ha...

Before we begin, I’m thrilled to share that Astrolab is continuing to be a sponsor of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter for the third year in a row! 🌙 California-based Astrolab is developing large multi-purpose rovers called FLIP and FLEX for advanced exploration of our Moon this decade and next. The first FLIP rover is slated to fly on Astrobotic’s upcoming Griffin lunar lander . And NASA has selected a FLEX rover as one of its two Artemis crew-capable Lunar Terrain Vehicles, ...

I've never really tracked my #100DaysToOffload effort very well, so I decided to create a page to help me track it. Turns out I've completed the challenge 7 times! https://kevquirk.com/100 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . I've never really tracked my #100DaysToOffload effort...

I’ve been working as a fractional CMO and enterprise SEO consultant for over 2 years now. So yes, I’m going to spend the next 1900+ words convincing you how colossally stupid it would be for you to hire me. Or any other fractional CMO. What You Actually Get When Hiring a Fractional CMO You may think you’re getting a third of someone’s time at a third of the price. You are not. It’s more like 15% of the time at 50% of the price. First, the full-time CMO baseline...

Many people are saying that AI will make software faster by rewriting it in faster languages, but this isn’t generally true. Most programs cannot be meaningfully sped up by rewriting them in C or Rust. How can this be true? Some languages are orders-of-magnitude faster than others: for instance, C can be fifty times faster than Python. Won’t rewriting my Python program in C thus make it fifty times faster? No, it won’t. Software performance is usually dominated by I/O, not the speed ...

FedEx closed fiscal 2026 with about 300,000 permanent full-time and 230,000 permanent part-time employees, according to its 10-K for the year ended May 31, 2026. Two business exits followed: FedEx Freight on June 1 and FedEx Supply Chain on October 1. These FedEx employee statistics cover headcount, unit splits, union status, hourly pay, turnover and labor costs from 2025 and 2026 filings and pay data. FedEx Employee Statistics ~230,000 Permanent part-time employees at FedEx on May 31, ...

Originally published on Rails At Scale . The title was bait to get you to open this article. But fear not! We will be generating code at run-time today. (See the PR for a sneak peek.) Sam popped into the JIT channel asking how we might optimize Rails enums in Roundhouse, motivated by the following code snippet: class Order ruby -I~/git/ips/lib test.rb -- create_table(:orders) -> 0.0073s shippable?: 1.721M i/s (± 2.3%, GC 4.4%) aaron@Aarons-MBP ~/g/rails (main...

We are entering an epoch where it may become easy for small pieces of self-replicating code to permanently infest Internet-connected devices in a way that is hard to undo. Such a world would be annoying to live in and we should take steps to forestall it. Anyone who used email in the 1990s remembers a similar, primitive era, when worms and viruses briefly ruled the net. But the connected world of that time was too simple to sustain an ecosystem of rogue escapees. Even today, much of the intern...

A recent Anthropic blog post contained a short paragraph, not at all the point of the post, which has been buzzing around my brain since I read it: A new level of operational excellence is possible. Our team uses Claude Tag heavily, which has helped us monitor each component of the system. For example, we created Slack channels where we tasked Claude with being obsessively focused on the health of a single component. We call these Claudes “superfans.” We have a scion-daemon superfan, a...

In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087, a chip that made floating-point operations much faster in the IBM PC and other systems. Although the 8087 supports advanced operations such as tangents, square roots, and logarithms, this article focuses on basic arithmetic operations: addition and subtraction. The 8087 provided a spectacular speed improvement over the 8086 processor, speeding up addition by a factor of almost 100, and complicated operations by even more. 1 In this article, I examine the 8087...

Hello, Welcome to another Friday. This week marks exactly 2 years since the Space Age release . 2.1 Stable After a long summer in experimental, 2.1 is now marked as stable. Thank you to everyone who played the experimental, reported bugs, and gave us feedback. A lot of the changes and tweaks since the first 2.1 release came directly from your reports. We took this opportunity to update our classic Factorio trailer one last time. As ...

Following our blog on Autonomy Factories , this is the second in our series exploring autonomy. An unmanned aircraft is tracking a vehicle during an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance mission. The vehicle disappears beneath the tree line. As the aircraft searches the surrounding terrain, its communications link is disrupted and the operator loses contact. The operator can no longer intervene, but the mission must continue. The aircraft’s mission autonomy software, or autonomou...

Samartha Chandrashekar & Nick Parker You click play on a Friday night, and in the second that follows, dozens of services answer in milliseconds. Most of them run on Titus, our internal container platform. Titus is, in essence, a Kubernetes-based container hosting platform: we keep both the control plane and the data plane (the container hosts that actually run containers) patched and up to date, so application teams get a consistent and reliable container experience. They hand us a container...

Gergely Orosz is frustrated at those that entered his explicitly “No AI” essay competition and used AI. He goes on to say: When I start to suspect some part is AI about someone I don’t know: how can I tell how much of it is? And how much time and effort do I want to invest to figure out? I fear most people do not realize this last part: that when it takes time and effort from others to figure out what % is AI, and what % is YOU, then I will simply assume it’s probably 100% A...

My latest vibe coded game experiment is a Command & Conquer style RTS (Real Time Strategy) game called Battle Drones ( play it here ). Unlike my previous experiments , this one is actually fun to play . I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I got there by telling Claude to "Make it a LOT more fun". It also supports multiplayer between nearby devices using audio to synchronize game state! Here's what I've built so far, and some of the things I learned along the way. Battle Drones ...

Decision models have exploded onto the scene recently, starting with TypeSafe’s Jev, followed by Perplexity’s Decider, Liquid’s d1, Cloudflare’s Clef, and OpenAI’s Decisions API 1 . These models promise fast, inexpensive classification. Decision models are an appealing low-cost alternative to LLM judges 2 for automated evals. But whether they’re the right choice depends on the cost, performance, and latency requirements of your use case. We’ve also noticed people using the def...

Chessbook-1, Maia-3 and Allie 2.0 at a glance Capability scorecard: a 0-100 grade per measurement, and whether the model has the capability at all. Predicting human moves Matching strength Time scramble play Predicting think time Predicting who wins Chessbook-1 199M parameters 96 / 100 81 / 100 84 / 100 98 / 100 97 / 100 Maia-3 79M parameters 85 / 100 56 / 100 57 / 100 No 80 / 100 Allie 2.0 5.6B parameters 99 / 100 48 / 100 99 / 100...